A Fool's Alphabet Read Online Free PDF Page A

son’s education.
    Soon after Pietro had learned to walk Francesca bought him a dressing gown that was several sizes too large and covered his feet from view. His tottering, erratic spurts about the room consequently looked as though they were propelled on hidden castors. He lacked concentration. When Francesca gave all her charm and skill to interest him in some highly coloured game, his eyes would glaze over and he would rush from the room to point with solemn interest at a milk bottle or a stone. When for the eighth time he ignored her warning about the steepness of the steps outside the kitchen door, she pretended to have no sympathy and told him that his bleeding lip would teach him a lesson. Then she picked him up and held him, seeing his blood on the front of her cotton shirt. For a moment he stopped wailing, but it was only so he could fill his lungs for a still greater effort. Francesca tried to believe that the lapse between the inhalation of breath and the final expulsion of the sob was not a true indicator of his distress.
    The lightening of his solipsistic world came like a long-awaited dawn on a dark sea. First there was his evident love for his mother. Then there came a grudging but appreciable change of outlook in his other attitudes. He managed to listen to whole sentences uttered by his parents without tossing his head in impatience or frank disbelief. He formed an unprompted friendship with a surly boxer puppy that hisfather had bought from a local farmer. He took a fierce interest in the lives of various animal characters in the comic strips his mother read to him. At last, when some large-eyed bear was separated from its family, Pietro shed his first tears on behalf of another.
    Francesca was relieved by the evidence of altruism. There had been moments in the long night of his infancy when she wondered if her son would ever look beyond the immediate desires of his body. Now she felt ashamed of such doubts. She wasn’t yet ready to proclaim him a genius or a saint, but she was content that he would be a good boy, like his father, and like her own father back in Rome.
    The pain of Pietro’s birth, however, had not been merely the price of motherhood. There were minor abnormalities in Francesca which persuaded the doctor to refer her to a specialist who in turn told her that she should not consider having other children for the time being. He said she should come and see him at intervals and he would tell her when it was safe for her to begin again. Russell was more disappointed than his wife by the news. He saw himself as the head of a family of three or four children at least.
    Francesca herself, brought up in the idea of large and extended families, felt the strangeness of her intimacy with Pietro. With no one else in the house, he was her friend and the recipient of her confidences. When she taught him to speak she felt as though she were entering a private conspiracy with him. She taught him Italian words as well as English. When something upset or worried her she told him about it, even though she knew he could barely understand the words and would have no conception of the feelings. Gradually he became more interested in what she said. Most of his utterances were demands for information, for the names of animals and objects. He always wanted to know what things were for. There came the day, however, when he asked his first personal questions of her; when he wanted to know about some aspect of her life.
    The days passed in a long helpless slide as the boy was twoor three or five years old. A new quality began to grow in him. It started with the way in which he mouthed the words he spoke. The first time he uttered a new word it was with a gentle awe that made it sound unspoken until that moment, as though his child’s palate had just minted it. But it was not just the inexperience of the very young; although he was stern towards himself and others, there was also some gentleness in him,